Monday, March 17, 2014

Fighting Fire the Ernie Gygax Benefit Adventure

Recently Ernie Gygax lost a number of personal items due to a fire in his home.

To make matters worse Ernie was laid up with CHF.

While insurance can replace some items, others were irreplaceable and frankly the shock of loss is a lot.

To help out the gaming community has offered something, this time a system neutral adventure "Fighting Fire".

The idea is simple, a third of the money goes to helping out Ernie.

The adventure itself is 32 pages (minus cover and title pages) with some NPCs. It is edition agnostic (neutral in their words). While they could have used something simple like Swords & Wizardry to give it some crunch, there isn't anything here an experienced gamer could run in about hour of prep time. In fact while typing this I have gone from wanting to run this at as an "Old-school" adventure with something like Basic D&D to maybe running it under 3rd ed. instead.

The adventure is a simple, if tongue in cheek, one. Defeat the evil fire wizard.

There is a lot of self-referential material here. So knowing a little bit about the gaming industry and some of the people involved over the years will help you see some of the inside jokes. But if not the adventure does not suffer for it.

It is described as a fairly simple adventure and it doesn't disappoint on the that regard. Easily dropped into any game and any campaign.

A lot of the art and maps come from various sources. I personally think it is kind of cool. Everyone contributed something to this.

While I can be accused (and rightly so) of waxing too nostalgic at times, I like the idea of the town of Gamington. I also like the idea of adding it to my own world as a place where old adventurers go to retire. They bring their treasure hoards and retire in style.